on the heritability of bad parenting skills
by Intaglionyx
Summary: Returning home, Canas rediscovers his half-forgotten son. (If only there was a tome that taught fatherhood.)


When you come through the doorway with your pack bundled under one arm and your robes damp with summer rain, your son turns from his place before your mother's chair to look at you with an expression of curiosity that tilts, starting at one corner of his mouth and moving to the other, to one of confusion. You have learned (this is not the first time that you have left your family, though you have never been absent for so long) not to expect joy or pleasure, but you did expect—something. Shock.

It takes several moments for him to display some sign of recognition. The sight of it brings the guilt up, slow and hot like bile, from the pit of your stomach to your throat. When it comes, when he knows who you are again, he opens his mouth only to shut it again, to look at you with wide eyes until your mother gives him a gentle nudge to the arm with her knee. Rainwater hangs from your nose until you wipe it away with a chill-numbed finger.

He calls you _Pa-pa_. You call him _Hugh_. The thought of calling him _Son_ brings the old rush of guilt-heat to coil within you; you have not earned that familiarity, and if you have ever earned it before than you did so only to lose it, again and again. You doubt you will ever keep it.

Your pack finds its way to the floor and your son finds his way out of the room. Your mother tells you in a low voice (she thinks to spare his feelings when she never bothered to spare your own, and you can't help but let a a helpless little smile ghost across your face at the thought) that Hugh is still "struggling." You think of your niece and wonder at your mother's shock at the thought that a boy his age would be more interested in running under the sun than living with his eyes adjusted to the dark and his little fingers dulled by a thousand musty page-corners.

You talk of elder magic until the sky framed by that open doorway grows dark from more than clouds and rain. Your wife puts Hugh to bed. He holds her hand as they make their way down the hall. The sight of them, parent and child, makes you feel isolated and half-formed.

It occurs to you that he has not spoken since his muttered acknowledgment shortly after your arrival. The first and only word you have heard from him in six months, Pa-Pa, feels to you like both a lie and an admonishment, and it cuts at your heart. You have been more of a father to your niece than to your son.

You wake as the sun rises. Hugh is seated cross-legged in your mother's rocking chair with a novice's tome open wide enough to cover both knees. His expression—brows knit in concentration and lips pursed to give his face a troubled look overall—reminds you so of your youngest brother that you are torn between pride and the desire to rip the tome from between his child-sized hands. Instead of following either impulse, you clear your throat to say: "Let's go somewhere." The boy looks up at you in surprise, but he slaps the tome shut and sets it aside readily enough.

Moments later, with the morning fog thick around you both, you wonder what on earth you were thinking. You don't know what normal children do for enjoyment, let alone what your own son does—or would do, if he were not under your mother's tutelage. The chill, damp post-rain air reflects your inner mood.

You walk slowly along the path that leads down from your mother's mountainside home, waiting for inspiration to strike as it always did when you struggled with a smudged letter or some archaic bit of text in Nosferatu. If only communicating with your offspring were that easy. . You find yourself recalling the day that Lord Pent, no doubt trying to bring some fragment of cheer to her after the deaths of so many of her surrogate family, conjured up a rosebud of flames and let it drift from his hand to Nino's outstretched ones. At seeing a glimmer of happiness pass across her face, and upon hearing her ask with determination to know how he had done such a trick, you looked up to your friend with an expression of gratitude that had hidden more than a bit of jealousy. Elder magic, you know, holds no such joyful wonders, only mysteries wrapped in further mysteries, all tied up in danger and the ever-present fear and caution that your mother worked so hard to impress upon you. You kick a stray pebble with your toe in irritation, not knowing what else to do.

A smile quirks your face when you see the boy do the same thing a moment later, but it flits away shortly thereafter. Your son cannot see it, he is walking with his eyes to the path beneath his feet, not to you. You cannot blame him.

Growing desperate, you blurt out: "Has your grandmother ever told you stories of dragons?"

He looks up at you with narrowed eyes. That almost-sneer reminds you of another of your brothers, the second oldest. "Grandmother doesn't tell stories," he says. And then: "But she does mention dragons sometimes."

You try to smile, knowing that it must come out as something bitter and half-formed. "Would you like to hear some?" you ask, hoping.

Hugh looks up at you with your oldest brother's eyes, searching for something, then nods.

Time passes as words of fire and death and others people's heroism tumble from your lips in an urgent mess. Interest dawns in his eyes gradually, until your son is hanging on your words in a way that brings you a kind of joy that you haven't felt since helping your niece with her reading. For as long as your disorganized tale-one with few names, but a wealth of detail that adds enough credibility to keep a bored child interested-lasts, you feel almost like a father.

The fog clears just in time for tentative drops of rain to fall, followed by a torrent that sends you both running for the cottage with your hands held up to shield your eyes from the wet and the cold. Somewhere along the way, his hand finds its way into yours.


End file.
